December 10, 2008

’Tis the season

Hat tip to K-Bro, who sent along this little tidbit spotted at her workplace. Oh, where to begin?

There’s a general problem with the awkwardness of the sentence Join us in this celebration by having our own potluck and there is the problem with Participation in the potluck are for those who bring a dish instead of Participation in the potluck is for those who bring a dish.

But K-Bro was quick to point out the odd ellipsis in the middle of the first sentence, asking “Is that even right?” (The answer to that is no, an ellipsis has three dots, not unlimited dots, and also I would agree that this isn’t the best placement for it but I think it’s a sort of design choice rather than a punctuational one.)

But, oh, the misplaced apostrophe in ’Tis. MRP is sensing a trend that doesn’t fill me holiday cheer. Check out this mailing I received just the day before I got K-Bro’s missive:

Okay, here’s the deal. ’Tis is an abbreviation for it is. As such, the apostrophe replaces the missing letter, which is i. Therefore, the apostrophe goes before tis. Not after it. Where it makes no sense. So stop doing that.

People don’t think about what words mean when they get wrapped up in the feeling those words are meant to evoke. “‘Tis”, for example, doesn’t mean “it is” anymore. Instead, it means, “Look, it’s almost Christmas. That’s why we’re using cute words like this.”

God forfend that ever I should support such a position! No, people have no license to be messy with their language during any season. Most particularly not during the season that celebrates the birth of someone who warned us that omitting “jots or tittles” was a bad thing.

I can’t really see exactly how many dots are in that ellipsis, but I did happen to be look up information on ellipses yesterday. It turns out that in Chinese, the ellipsis is actually six dots, while in Japanese, it’s either three dots or six dots or… apparently some random variation thereof. Maybe the writer reads a lot of manga.

Try (1): Copy and paste from a Microsoft Word document where Smart Quotes can be fooled as originally suggested. Try (2): While holding down the Alt key, use the number pad to enter 0146. Try (3): Same as 2 but using 0180.

[…] Perilous punctuation — mighty red pen @ 2:26 pm K-Bro, who wrote a while back to share a flyer from an office holiday potluck, wrote back with an update. She points out for our information that there were two turkeys and two […]

To be clear – as it is confusing with non-serif type here – that the ‘ (apostrophe mark) curves out AWAY FROM the tis – (and NOT inward like a single quotation mark)??? (like when used in ” it’s ” )
Help! Can any refence this in any common literature??